Auchenstroan Coloured Ryelands

If there’s one thing sheep are good at, aside from scoffing copious amounts of grass, it’s getting into pickles. These include activities such as getting your head stuck in a fence (more common in the younger members of the flock), going into panic when you realise the rest of the flock have wandered off and […]

For a while now Adrian and I have been thinking about silvopasture.   This is a pasture system where livestock are given controlled access to trees so they can enjoy the benefits of woodland grazing. Silvopasture has loads of benefits, not only to livestock but also on a grander scale to the planet.  The more trees […]

A few years ago Adrian and I were a normal couple who had summer holidays and long weekends off, lazy Sundays and spontaneous trips away. And then we got sheep… To be honest, we were a little naïve when we acquired our mini flock back in 2014.  We wanted to keep the grass down and […]

This is the first of a series of articles I’m going to be writing about felting fleeces.  As a lot of readers probably already know from visiting our shop, I transform fleeces into sheep-friendly “sheepskin” rugs and cushions by wet felting raw wool, a technique which has been around for many hundreds, if not thousands […]

From time to time sheep pick up things and become ill, particularly lambs.  Similar to newborn babies, lambs are particularly vulnerable to disease as their immune systems have not yet built up that all important resilience which only develops over time as they mature. We always joke that lambing is not over once all the […]

On our smallholding our main focus is making sure our animals have a long and happy life, but we also love plants and if there’s a plant in trouble, we’ll make sure we do our best to save it.  This story is about our efforts to rescue a beautiful Himalayan Cedar tree. During the winter […]

Earlier this year, I wrote about a drystane dyke that had a small gap of fallen stones but was to be a major repair (Major Stone Dyke Repairs After Walker Damage). It has taken a while, but repairs are finally complete. All in all, I had to take down 17 metres of dyke to find […]

Last year, we extended our paddock area with the addition of what we creatively call the ‘new paddock‘. While it’s great for the sheep (more grass and space), we thought it would be good to add in something for ourselves. We already have a few apple trees but not enough to make cider vinegar, cider […]

Regular visitors to this blog will know I spend a fair amount of time repairing the dry stone dykes we have here. We inherited some fallen down sections from the previous owners and a couple of storms did some damage as well. However, the latest repair is down to what can best be described as […]

Our hens have all the creature comforts we can provide. There are three state of the art plastic hen houses with automatic door openers that open and close at dawn and dusk. Inside, there are purpose built roosting bars or individual boxes packed with fresh sawdust. Each hen can choose its own sleeping arrangements to […]

Some time back, we connected our hill paddocks with the orchard next to our house. We like having the sheep close by. It’s what we call the ‘lambing paddock’, mainly because we built a lambing shed there. Really, it should be the ‘orchard paddock’ as it is home to our apple trees, all protected from […]

Every year we have been here, we have planted more trees as part of our goal to rewild large areas of our smallholding. Earlier this year, we created a new wildlife corridor and this winter, our task will be to fill it with (more) trees. This involved a lot of fencing, mainly to stop the […]